About

Introduction

On October 4–6, 2013, Eyebeam hosted the first event of its kind, PRISM Breakup, a series of art and technology events dedicated to exploring and providing forms of protection from surveillance. This event came about in part from Eyebeam’s mission to support the work of artists who critically expose technologies and examine their relationship to society, as well as offering continued support to its alumni following their residencies. The gathering brought together a wide spectrum of artists, hackers, academics, activists, security analysts and journalists for a long weekend of meaningful conversation, hands-on workshops, and an art exhibition that was open October 4–12.

Map

Why does it matter?

In the contemporary digital era, privacy has become a luxury for the initiated. Google and Facebook mine your personal data for a profit, the government monitors your phone calls, even shopping malls track the mobile phones connected to their wifi. In the wake of revelations about the NSA PRISM program, many citizens are left wondering what they can do to protect their privacy. We believe everyone has a right to define their own digital privacy, understand how it is being compromised, and feel empowered to protect it.

Initiatives like Prism Break, the Locker Project, and Security in a Box have attempted to combat privacy violations, but the process continues to be complex and inaccessible to the general population. We also recognize that security and privacy, especially at the hardware level, is tricky, but that’s not going to stop us from trying to determine how it can best be protected.

Have a question about the event? Want to help fund this exciting endeavor? Or would you like to volunteer food/drinks/money/time?Read more

Questions, etc.

Have a question about the event? Want to help fund this exciting endeavor? Or would you like to volunteer food/drinks/money/time? If you want to help out but don’t have a specific idea, email us and we can figure it out together. Email us at prismbreakup@eyebeam.org.

Talk / Oct 4 / 7:30pm–8:30pm

As an introduction to our event series, this panel will welcome a few policy and academic experts to comment on the current state of privacy in our post-PRISM domestic condition. What does it mean to be protected, how are we vulnerable and what are the political, legal, and academic implications of current privacy concerns? What programs enfeeble us and what tools and legal proposals might empower us? How can we take action to support responsible protection of precious social and personal assets? What might be the danger if we don’t?

Reception / Oct 4 / 8:30pm–10:30pm

Talk / Oct 5 / 11:30am–12:00pm

Chronically underserved communities – communities of color, poor people, migrants, and indigenous people – have historically shouldered the burden of an overbroad surveillance state. From redlining to medical research to racial profiling ot data profiling, the underserved have had their personal data used as instruments of exploitation. For many underserved communities, privacy is a luxury, not a right, and surveillance forms part of a larger system of discrimination and exclusion. Meanwhile, mainstream debate on surveillance and privacy remain fixated on principles of personal liberty and freedom. This talk opens a conversation about the palpable consequences of surveillance and presents a platform for privacy based on equality and social justice.

Workshop / Oct 5 / 12:00pm–1:00pm

It’s just your private email, the messages you send with friends and acquaintances. How could these things be a threat? We have seen in recent and past moments, how data collected through mass spying and surveillance programs can be used to characterize individuals as threats and criminals, often based on political motives and without much context. A common response to programs like PRISM is “Surveillance is helping us to identify criminals and people who threaten the public. There are people out there who want to hurt us. I have nothing to hide. Why should I care?”

In this workshop, we will provide documents using information widely available through public records and through PRISM or other surveillance and data collection. Participants will break out into groups and build evidence-based narratives based on metadata documentation, from both legal and journalistic perspectives.

Workshop / Oct 5 / 1:00pm–2:00pm

For the last couple of years The Guardian Project has been helping individuals to communicate more freely, and protect themselves from intrusion and monitoring. Through this workshop the audience will become acquainted with some of its most popular applications such as: Orbot, Orweb and Chatsecure.

Talk / Oct 5 / 2:00pm–2:30pm

As our dependence on smartphones and gps mapping technologies increases, we must come to terms with the fact that our locations are being tracked. Laura Poitras commented in her recent NYT Magazine profile, “Geolocation is the thing,” she said. “I want to keep as much off the grid as I can… I am not going to ping into any G.P.S. My location matters to me. It matters to me in a new way that I didn’t feel before.” What conveniences must we give up in exchange for keeping our physical locations private?

This talk will dive deeper into understanding how the Global Positioning System (GPS) works. While GPS coverage is practically ubiquitous, there are aspects where it is vulnerable. Devices, while illegal, can be used to jam GPS frequencies. More sophisticated manouevers can be used to spoof GPS signals. This technique was used to land the US Military drone in Iran in 2011, and research suggests that GPS spoofing could be used to interfere with high speed algorithmic trading.

Talk / Oct 5 / 2:30pm–3:00pm

We define obfuscation as the effort to hide information not through concealment but through noise and confusion. Tactical obfuscation may be harnessed as a mode of resistance to surveillance and security breaches in multiple technological manifestations. Because obfuscation is relatively flexible in its use by average citizens as well as by experts, it holds great promise as a universal principle of DIY privacy and security. The talk will present two lightweight systems of obfuscation: one, a mature browser extension, TrackMeNot, which shields search from surveillance and data profiling, and a second, as-yet-unnamed, which we will be unveiling,here, for the first time.

Workshop / Oct 5 / 3:00pm–4:00pm

This workshop is designed for those individuals interested in learning about: Ostel, an operating system sponsored by The Guardian Project. Ostel allows anyone to make secure voice and video calls over the Internet, proving that it is possible to build a network for secure voice and video calling with open source software and Internet standards.

Talk / Oct 5 / 4:00pm–4:30pm

OpenPaths, created by the New York Times Company R&D Lab, is a platform that demonstrates the collective value of personal data sovereignty. It was developed in response to public outrage regarding the location record generated by Apple iOS devices. OpenPaths participants store their encrypted geographic data online while maintaining ownership and programmatic control. Projects of many kinds, from mobility research to expressive artwork, petition individuals for access to their data. In the context of locative media practice, OpenPaths expands the notion of the tracing to address the components of an ethical implementation of crowdsourced geographic systems in the age of “big data”. This talk explains the history and results of the project and its implications in the current data climate.

Talk / Oct 5 / 4:30pm–5:00pm

For many years, security experts and whistleblowers have warned us of the growing surveillance capacity of states, and the increasing role that corporations play in the brokerage of our rights to privacy and anonymity. However, given Lavabit and SilentCircle’s responses to the NSA revelations, it is also clear that informed paranoia is not always enough to counter this strengthening surveillance culture.

The data storage approach taken by Martus (a secure human rights documentation solution) has proven to be an effective approach(so far). Decryption keys are not stored on Martus servers, and the encryption algorithms employed by Martus (over the last 10 years) are not considered compromised by the larger security community.
However, finding an effective technical solution is only one part of the paranoia equation. Ensuring that people adopt best practices, and making encryption tools “usable” to most humans is also a significant challenge.

In this talk, we expect to share our experience building and supporting Martus, a secure solutions for human rights documentation, and our experiences implementing best practices to help shield the identity of victims or witnesses in some of the most challenging situations around the world.

Talk / Oct 6 / 11:30am–12:00pm

Although the available scope of surveillance has increased dramatically over the past two decades due to massive increases in the mobility and pervasiveness of communication technologies, legal and technical overreach in the early application of new technologies is an identifiable historical pattern. Duff and McGregor will discuss two examples with opposing origins and similar outcomes – the U.S. postal system and the traditional telephone industry – and the implications that these systems’ precedents may suggest for the shaping protection of personal privacy and security in the digital communications era.

Talk / Oct 6 / 12:00pm–12:30pm

The National Business Park is an office park in southern Maryland, less than a mile away from Fort Meade and the NSA offices. Its tenants include most of the major players of the defense contractor industry (L-3 Communications, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman) as well as some government agencies (which ones, exactly, are classified). This talk-as-Google Streetview tour of the NBP and its tenants will use the architecture and landscape of the seemingly banal office part as a lens through which to better understand the different players and participants in the intelligence and defense contracting industry. Notes from the ongoing project are available here.

Workshop / Oct 6 / 12:30pm–1:30pm

This workshop, for beginners and the technically savvy alike, explores the possibilities of wifi-enabled virtual public spaces for strangers to anonymously interact. We’ll discuss the theory and technology of self-contained networks, and explore what potential uses they might have in practice. Come with a laptop and ideas for how Occupy.here might help your community.

Workshop / Oct 6 / 1:30pm–2:30pm

…promise. Tor is a free software aimed at helping internauts defend themselves against network surveillance and traffic tracking. This workshop will walk through the steps of setting up TOR, some vulnerabilities, and use cases.

Talk / Oct 6 / 2:30pm–3:00pm

People want to believe that technology has the answers. It’s tempting for privacy-seekers to believe that the solution against PRISM is as easy as downloading an app. But PRISM is not just a technological problem — it’s a social, political issue that stems from the permission given to intelligence apparatuses to rise above the law. It’s a fallaciously upheld threat to a healthy international democratic mindset, and has to be treated that way: as a human problem.

In this talk, Nadim will outline how Cryptocat has reacted to PRISM, what we feel encryption tools can offer, and most importantly, how they can’t help you — therefore showcasing the importance of a political approach. Drawing from real-world examples of how the world has reacted to PRISM, he further elaborates on dangerous mental pitfalls in hopes of advancing our understanding of the threat.

Talk / Oct 6 / 3:00pm–3:30pm

What happens when you need to share a vital message with a chosen few? The Signal Strength Project is an alternative network for cell phones that allows people to connect despite political unrest and disaster relief. It consists of hardware that hacks used mobile phones in order to entirely circumvent cell phone providers and enable offline, peer to peer communication. It explores the role of technology in shaping resistance by bypassing our current infrastructure to create a new, private network for a close-knit community.

Workshop / Oct 6 / 3:30pm–4:30pm

Interested in protecting your information, but don’t really know where to start?

In this workshop we will give a brief explanation of how encryption works followed by a practical tutorial on how to communicate securely. Subjects of discussion will include:

- Irreversible functions and how they can hide data
- Creating a Cryptographic identity
- Sending a secure message with PGP
- Overview of applications and plugins with built-in encryption
- Getting your machine set up to use these tools seamlessly
- Common security problems

Workshop participants should have Thunderbird or Apple Mail.app setup and configured with their email accounts prior to this workshop.

Talk / Oct 6 / 4:30pm–5:00pm

Occupy.here is an invisible virtual space for anonymous speech, built on Internet technologies but intended to run independently of the Internet itself. The project seeks to create and maintain a network of affiliated wifi routers, each hosting local services that don’t require an Internet connection. Each wifi network—identified with the SSID “occupy.here”—allows those within physical proximity of the signal to connect to custom-built social software. Once connected, any URL you type into your web browser redirects you to http://occupy.here/, a website offering a mobile-friendly message board and a growing library of e-books and articles. It’s a tiny wifi-powered darknet, connecting you with your neighbors and possibly past and future neighbors.

Talk / Oct 6 / 6:00pm–6:30pm

Since the Snowden leaks began, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress to rein in the NSA. Punctuated by an international perspective on NSA surveillance, this talk will explore the ways people can engage with the SWU cause.

Workshop / Oct 6 / 6:30pm–7:30pm

As our dependence on smartphones and gps mapping technologies increases, we must come to terms with the fact that our locations are being tracked. Laura Poitras commented in her recent NYT Magazine profile, “Geolocation is the thing,” she said. “I want to keep as much off the grid as I can… I am not going to ping into any G.P.S. My location matters to me. It matters to me in a new way that I didn’t feel before.” What conveniences must we give up in exchange for keeping our physical locations private?

This talk will dive deeper into understanding how the Global Positioning System (GPS) works. While GPS coverage is practically ubiquitous, there are aspects where it is vulnerable. Devices, while illegal, can be used to jam GPS frequencies. More sophisticated manouevers can be used to spoof GPS signals. This technique was used to land the US Military drone in Iran in 2011, and research suggests that GPS spoofing could be used to interfere with high speed algorithmic trading.

This will be an informal workshop during the cryptoparty. Because no jailbreak exists yet for iOS7, please have earlier versions of iOS installed in order to jailbreak your phone.

Party / Oct 6 / 6:30pm–8:30pm

A CryptoParty format varies, but generally it begins with a few short presentations (~15 minutes each) followed by people asking for/offering help with installing various cryptographic software for the rest of the event, more information can be found here: http://www.cryptoparty.in/. Snacks and drinks are implied.

Artwork

Addie Wagenknecht is a conceptual and social hacker who hopes to challenge the
status quo and create a sense of bittersweet irony (preferably both at once).

She is currently the chair of the Open Hardware Summit at MIT, an
artist at Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab as well as
co-founder of NORTD which created the open source lasercutter
Lasersaur. It is estimated to have around 1,000
active developers including New York University, Stanford University
and Carnegie Mellon University.

Workshop

Lee Azzarello applies technology to liberate and promote free expression. He has worked in file sharing, broadcast, telephony, big data, independent publishing and electronic art. He has worked with the global Free Software community since 2001.

Workshop

Talk

Finn Brunton is an Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, for which he has received critical acclaim. Of late, he has been conducting research with Helen Nissenbaum on the political and theoretical implications of DIY approaches to privacy protection.

Artwork

Ryan Jennings Clark creates immersive installations, electronic sculptures, and lens based works which explore the visual representation of time and humanity’s psychological relationships with technology and implied progress. He received his BFA from the University of Iowa and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of art. His studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.

Talk

Kathleen P. Duff is an attorney licensed to practice in New York State and serves as Senior Editor, Operations at ALM (American Lawyer Media). She holds an A.B. in History from Dartmouth College (‘02), cum laude, as well as a J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School (‘06). Her research focuses on the intersection of law and technology, with an emphasis privacy in the digital age.

Talk

Workshop

Seeta Peña Gangadharan is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI). Her research focuses on the nature of digital inclusion, including inclusion in potentially harmful aspects of Internet adoption due to data mining, data profiling, and other facets of online surveillance and privacy.

Artwork

Benjamin Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that explore the cultural, social, and political implications of software. His works have been featured in Wired, Make, Neural, Corriere della Sera, Creative Applications Network, The New Aesthetic, FastCoDesign, and the Los Angeles Times. The Huffington Post said of his Interactive Robotic Painting Machine that “Grosser may have unknowingly birthed the apocalypse.” Most recently, Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator was part of Public Assembly at The White Building in London and The Public Private at Parsons in New York curated by Christiane Paul. His recognitions include awards from Terminal, Creative Divergents, and NASA. Grosser holds an MFA in new media and an MM in music composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he now teaches in the School of Art & Design.

Workshop

Genevieve Hoffman is an artist and designer working at the intersections of research, data, science, sustainability and design. Technology is an underpinning of all of her work, as both a medium and subject of inquiry. She is especially concerned with the planned obsolescence built into the disposable culture of our digital era, as well as the relationship between technology and the natural resources that make it possible. Recently, she has been exploring non-monetary currencies, the forces and interrelated systems of the global economy, and the infrastructure that makes it all run. She has spoken about and presented her work at various institutions, including the Rhode Island School of Design (RI), University of Georgia (GA), SUNY Stonybrook (NY), New York Hall of Science(NY), School of Visual Arts (NY), New York University (NY), and the University of Buffalo (NY). She recently completed a research residency at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where she received a Master’s degree in Research Arts.

Workshop

Harlo Holmes is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist. As research fellow and head of metadata with The Guardian Project, she primarily investigates topics in digital media steganography, metadata, and the standards surrounding technology in the social sciences. She harnesses her multi-faceted background in service of responding to the growing technological needs of human rights workers, journalists, and other do-gooders around the world.

Talk

Artwork

Brian House is a media artist whose work traverses alternative geographies, experimental music, and a critical data practice. He is interested in the contingent qualities of information and how we experience time in network culture. Currently, Brian teaches in the Digital + Media program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Previously, he was a member of the New York Times Research and Development Lab, and was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam: Art and Technology Center

Workshop

By day, David writes code for the coolest museum in Brooklyn. By night, he helps organize Art Hack Day, a global part-hackathon, part-happening which brings artists and hackers together for 48 hours to build a pop-up exhibition. Before arriving in New York, he was one of the founding members for HeatSync Labs, an Arizona hackerspace which brings makers, hackers, and the occasional futurist together to build things and teach others how to do the same.

Artwork

Dean Hunt, Olof Mathé, Chanpory Rith are SF-based hackers, artists, designers. They’re particularly interested in notions of backdoor access, the nature and meaning of online identity and the implicit trust we grant both software and hardware. Their work often puts the user at risk: as such, Pantheon explores the continuum of fear and delight that arises from unexpected intimacy when impersonating someone. When they’re not co-creating art they build tools for interactive storytelling at Inkling.

Workshop

Becky is the Codesign Facilitator and Community Organizer at the Center for Civic Media. She spends her time with changemakers of many kinds codesigning tools and methods to leverage media and technology for equitable social change. Prior to joining the Center, she led the SaferMobile project at MobileActive, a program to educate and train activists, journalists, and human rights defenders in mobile phone security.

Artwork

Rachel Law is a conceptual artist and programmer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice is centered around social mythologies and how technology facilitates the creation of new communities. Her favourite letter is C: cake, cats, comics, computers, code, cookies.

Artwork

RoLd is a collaborative team consisting of brother and sister Ld Lawrence and Ro Lawrence. After decades of separate practices they began collaborating in fall of 2012 on a public space graphic intervention for the Conflux Festival in New York.

Ld Lawrence is interested in how possible meanings of a shape or symbol change when teamed with other shapes and set into shifting contexts. She spends her days scouting city streets for iron walls, doors, grates, and gates…all receptive magnetic surfaces. There’s a lot of iron in New York. She places magnetic shapes on iron surfaces to create public interactive street art. Unlike painted graffiti, her work is temporary, mobile and interactive. After arranging shapes on a ferrous surface, she documents the work, then either removes the pieces making the work invisible, or leaves it in location while she becomes invisible and observes how the public reacts with the piece. Once people realize the pieces are movable the playful interaction begins. This current street series grew from a studio practice of adding powdered ferrous particles to paint applied to gallery walls creating a magnetically receptive surface for movable interactive murals. Extending the negative space of her compositions to include the weathered patina of city surfaces is a logical progression from her more controlled studio work. The movement into urban street art gives the work a social turn of expanded dimensions. Lawrence’s paintings have been exhibited extensively in New York and Internationally, most recently in Seoul, South Korea.

LdLawrencedotcom.wordpress.com

Ro Lawrence engages contradictions at the interface of the Internet and embodied space. Lawrence’s combined physical and Internet works comment on how we live contradictory physical and Internet lives. He chaired in New York the first CAA annual convention panel on hybrid post-internet art. Lawrence reformulates rolls of media producer/consumer with visionary applications of digital technologies. His groundbreaking 2004-8 open source film Un Message screened worldwide. His Tango Interventions have been produced in 42 cities including NYC, Berlin, Wien, and Phnom Penh. Tango Panopticon 2.0 streamed live video from synchronous actions in public space under corporate/government video surveillance on 4 continents. Tango Panopticon Berlin was part of Exchange Radical Moments Live Art Festival on 11-11-11. Lawrence produces open source software facilitating Internet viewing and theater projection of unlimited simultaneous video streams shot remotely on cell phones. While crafting works of formal beauty, Lawrence breaks new ground positing streaming video as network nodes of embodied action. He is currently on a 9-month Fulbright Fellowship in Bucharest, Romania.

Workshop

Gabriella Levine is a creative technologist, interactive artist and open-source hardware designer interested in the relationship between technology and ecology. She creates sculptural and robotic works that mimic environmental phenomena and animal behavior, and acts as the COO of Protei Inc, manufacturing robotic biomimetic sailboats.

Artwork

Playing with computers since he was young, Tom eventually developed back and wrist pain, so he started studying ergonomics and conducting quantitative ergonomics research. Then he realized that he’d accidentally become a data scientist. And his back and wrists now hurt less. Tom likes using data to help people work less and think more. He recently has been teaching data science (http://zipfianacademy.com) and studying how open data is used (http://thomaslevine.com/socrata). He also has a band that makes music from spreadsheets (http://csvsoundsystem.com).

Workshop

Blacki Li Rudi Migliozzi studied Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech and has a background in Discrete Math & Nano-Materials. His most recent works deal in the intersection of biotech and agricultural practices. He spent few years designing and prototyping small scale agricultural technologies. He currently works in New York City as a software engineer.

Talk

Barbra Mack is human rights technologist, currently working as a Technology Manager for the Martus project. She has worked as a web developer, analyst, and manager throughout her 10+ year career working for higher education and social change institutions, and holds a masters from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her interests include digital privacy and digital conservation, and the belief that intellectual freedom is necessary to build a global society that values all citizens as equal.

Talk

Katherine Maher is the Director of Strategy and Communications for Access Now, where she works to develop the organizations strategic approach across all three arms as well as oversees external communications. Previously, she has worked with UNICEF, the World Bank, and the National Democratic Institute on the use of ICT for human rights, development, democracy, and good governance. Katherine is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and sits on the boards of Masterpeace and the Youth for Technology Foundation.

Talk

Artwork

Amelia Marzec is a Brooklyn-based artist focused on enabling activist communities through innovative uses of technology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from the Parsons School of Design, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, and was awarded a residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. She is a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Emma Bee Bernstein Fellowship and the Paul Robeson Cultural Center Award. Her work has appeared in the Conflux Festival, Rhizome ArtBase, SIGGRAPH, Flux Factory, Neural Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Wired, Make, and on NPR. She has taught at the City University of New York, written for the Huffington Post, and has given talks and workshops at the Parsons School of Design and New York University.

Talk

Artwork

Susan E. McGregor is the Assistant Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where she specializes in data journalism and information visualization. She also speaks and writes regularly on topics at the intersection of security, technology and journalism, and in 2012 was part of a team awarded a Brown Institute for Media and Innovation “Magic Grant” to develop Dispatch, a tool for secure, anonymous, authenticated communication between journalists and their sources, currently available in the app stores for iPhone and Android.

Workshop

Ian McLaughlin wants to help make privacy on the web as easy as it is important. Aside from online security his interests include 3D rendering, mesh processing, physical simulation, and animation. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Princeton University and currently works in NYC as a software engineer.

Talk

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum’s research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, which was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press.

Artwork

Chris Woebken (MA Interaction Design, RCA, London / Eyebeam Resident / Ted Fellow): Chris Woebken uses futurization practices to create props, narratives and visualizations investigating the impacts as well as the aesthetic and social potentials of technologies. He runs workshops and often collaborates with scientists, organizations, artists and engineers to invent and build prototypes of future services and products.

He has worked with Natalie Jeremijenko, exhibited at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and has been a frequent guest critic and lecturer at Columbia University, the Rhode Island School of Design and New York City’s School of Visual Arts.

Daniel Goddemeyer (MA Interaction Design, RCA, London): Daniel Goddemeyer is a researcher and strategic interaction designer who works at the intersection of people, technology, design and urban space and focuses in his work on exploring their future connections, interdependencies and interactions with each other.

He is specifically interested in how ubiquitous technology, connectivity and data will affect, impact and shape our behaviors and culture in urban space in the coming years and, most of all, what new future opportunities this may hold.

During his past career he has been working at Antenna Design, IDEO, Future Farmers and Artefact among others.

He is currently teaching the class ‘Urban Fictions’ at New York City’s School of Visual Arts that explores and speculates about the impacts of ubiquitous technology and data on our interactions with one another and cities and has been a frequent speaker at conferences such as Epic and IDSA.

Artwork

david Opp is an artist / musician / educator / founder of noise label HCBrecords.com, living in Tel-Aviv/Jaffa, his artwork encompasses paintings, site specific, video installations & malfunctioning interactive sculptures. Examining: control systems, consumption marketing, militant nationalism & the physiognomy of terror. He exhibits & preforms regularly and is included in the permanent collection of the SF MoMa among others.

Talk

Workshop

Artwork

Dan Phiffer is a programmer and artist interested in hackable, inexpensive computer networks. His project, occupy.here, is an ongoing discovery process concerned with how we encounter the ideas of other people.

Talk

Enrique Piracés is Vice President of the Human Rights Program at Benetech. He has been working at the intersection of human rights, science, and technological innovation for more than 10 years. His focus has been both the implications of the use of technology in the context of human rights as well as the opportunities that new scientific and technological developments open for NGOs and practitioners. He is an advocate for the use of open source and strong crypto as the baseline for human rights documentation and journalistic work.

Artwork

Omer Shapira (1984, Israel): Formerly a Filmmaker and TV host in Israel, now a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Omer is interested in the boundaries of trust humans lend to algorithms. Omer has a B.Sc in Mathematics and Linguistics from Tel Aviv University.

Ryan Bartley (1980, United States): Formerly a part of a Post-Production company in Hollywood, now a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Ryan is a developer for the Cinder creative coding toolkit. Has a degree in Cinema from the University of Southern California.

Max Ma (1985, China): Formerly a Designer for Advertising agencies and working with Ai Weiwei, now a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Max became famous during his internship in Yahoo!, after one of the logos he designed ‘leaked’ and started chatter on the internet. Max has a degree in Design.

Talk

Ashkan Soltani is an independent researcher and consultant focused on privacy, security, and behavioral economics. His work draws attention to privacy problems online, demystifies technology for the non-technically inclined, and provides data to help inform policy. He lives in Washington, DC and eats lots of ramen but surprisingly few cookies.

Artwork

I make visual art from the digital leftovers produced by the main stream media as well as the digital leftovers we create as individuals left behind on social networking sites, and scattered across the web. I write automated computer programs that collect these digital leftovers by scraping them from the web, and remixing them into a digital collage, sometimes these digital leftovers become an image, a video, or text-based poetry. I call this work ‘Cruft’, which is a computer hacker term defined as an unpleasant substance; excess; superfluous junk; and redundant or superseded computer code.

Talk

Amie Stepanovich is the director of EPIC’s Domestic Surveillance Project. Her work encompasses the Fourth Amendment, national security, cybersecurity, digital identity, international privacy, and open government. Ms. Stepanovich is an expert on drone surveillance and has testified in front of Congress on the need for privacy protections for domestic drone use. She has discussed the privacy implications of surveillance at many prominent events, including the Internet Governance Forum (US), the General Assembly of the Atlantic Treaty Association, and the Dialouge on Diversity conference.

Artwork

Terri is of Rangitāne and Ngāti Kahungunu descent and grew up in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. She is currently working towards a Doctorate in Fine Arts at Te Pūtahi a Toi, Massey University, New Zealand.

Artwork

Emilio Vavarella was born in Monfalcone (Italy) in 1989. His artistic practice focuses on political philosophy and contemporary technological power with a particular emphasis on the aesthetics of error, subjectivity, mediated identity, biopolitics and social control. His work is informed by his studies on the history of conceptual art, digital and network culture, and new media practices. Through the use of new media he highlights the ambiguous spaces of power, such as unexpected errors and unpredictability. He believes that by doing so, the intrinsic logic and hidden structures of power are revealed and an intellectual resistance is formed. In addition to creating digitalized works, his projects are also concerned with engaging local communities, spectators, and other artists. In 2013, he completed his M.F.A from Iuav University of Venice with a thesis on Error and Metamorphosis in New Media Art. He has also studied art in Sicily and Barcelona, and completed a B.A. in Art History, Criticism and Methodology at the University of Bologna. This past year, he spent four months in Tel Aviv at Bezalel Academy of Arts’ studio residency program with a fellowship for Extra-European Studies and four months at Bilgi University of Istanbul with an Erasmus fellowship for Abroad Studies. Lives and works in New York.

Exhibition

The PRISM Break Up exhibition taking place in the main space at Eyebeam during the course of the event highlights the work of artists examining themes of surveillance, voyeurism, and communication through a critical artistic lens.